I was the first African-American woman to play Maggie in 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.' It was at the Virginia State Theatre, and we turned Richmond upside down.

We must empower parents, and address their concerns about school safety, the school curriculum and the decline in standards and results in Virginia schools.

I guess it's from going to Virginia Military Institute. I'm a good person to follow orders.

I mean my mother migrated from Georgia -Rome, Georgia, to Washington, D.C., where she then met my father, who was a Tuskegee Airman who was from Southern Virginia. They migrated to Washington and I wouldn't even exist if it were not for that migration. And I brought her back to Georgia, both my parents, actually.

I have family dotted everywhere - Dad's in California; I've got aunts in Scotland and Virginia; family in Kansas City; family in Manchester and London.

Simultaneously with the establishment of the Constitution, Virginia ceded to the United States her domain, which then extended to the Mississippi, and was even claimed to extend to the Pacific Ocean.

On the last morning of Virginia's bloodiest year since the Civil War, I built a fire and sat facing a window of darkness where at sunrise I knew I would find the sea.

My parents were both born in Virginia, of undistinguished families - second families, perhaps I should say.

I was born on the 24th of September 1755 in the county of Fauquier, at that time one of the frontier counties of Virginia. My father possessed scarcely any fortune and had received a very limited education - but was a man to whom nature had been bountiful, and who had assiduously improved her gifts.

In 1985, I was living with my sister in Virginia, and since I was still in high school, I worked at McDonald's to save money to get an abortion. It sounds really terrible, but it was the best decision I ever made. It was the first time I took responsibility for my actions. I messed up, had sex without contraception, and got pregnant at 15.

As a child, I was fortunate enough to be close to family members who were - and still are - great storytellers. I was a gullible country boy from Rocky Mount, Virginia, and I believed every folktale they told me, no matter how fantastic.

My father's family came from Virginia and Philadelphia. He wasn't a brother who talked a lot. He was a workingman, a quiet, blue-collar dude.

They're building a bridge over the Potomac for all the white liberals fleeing to Virginia.

I remember 'Virginia Plain' being on Top of the Pops, and everyone was talking about it the next day. Eno was bald on top with shoulder-length hair at the sides, and he was wearing a feather boa and a silver catsuit.

Here was buried Thomas Jefferson Author of the Declaration of American Independence Of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom & Father of the University of Virginia.

My role models were childless: Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes.

When I was growing up in Virginia, the Civil War was presented to me as glorious with dramatic courage and military honor. Later, I realized how death was central to the reality. It was at the core of women's lives. It's what they talked about most.

Pocahontas was the reason the Virginia colony didn't disappear, unlike some earlier attempts.

My dad's family was from Tennessee. I grew up in Lynchburg, Virginia, where we lived at the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains. As a kid, I was totally into Southern rock. Lynyrd Skynyrd. ZZ Top. It was so part of who I was.

I grew up in the segregated South, right here in Lynchburg, Virginia.